“Fea wonders what period of our history Trump has in mind when he says he wants America to be great ‘again'”

One of the things that has been missing from nearly all of these explanations and analyses has been a deep sense of the history of evangelical Christians in the U.S., starting at or even before the official birth of our nation. John Fea, who teaches American history at Messiah College and who describes himself as an evangelical, has rectified that in his new and enlightening book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. The official publication date is next week, but it can be pre-ordered now.

Fea is aghast and embarrassed by the choice so many of his fellow evangelicals made in the election. But he finds precedents in history for the way they responded not to hope but to fear. And, he asserts, it was fear and nostalgia for an imagined past that never existed that helped to move them into Trump’s camp. Indeed, Fea writes, “it is possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of Christians who have failed to overcome fear.”